WHEREAS, Secretary of State John F. Kerry has suggested that air conditioners are as big a threat as ISIS, and
WHEREAS, it is the duty of our elected and appointed government officials to lead by example,
THEREFORE, we call upon the U.S. Department of State to remove air conditioning from all property that the Department owns, rents, or otherwise employs, including but not limited to embassies, consulates, office buildings, etc., all vehicles owned and/or operated by the Department, and any other property, real or movable, owned, rented, or otherwise employed by the Department.
This petition will be delivered to:

• President of the United States
  Barack Obama
  

I wrote a new article comparing this Election to the elections of the 1850s.

http://drakus79.tumblr.com/post/14814224...y-election

http://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/201...19090c673c

Quote:If there’s something that convention attendees in Philadelphia and Cleveland both agree on, it’s that America needs higher middle-class living standards. But we won’t have to wait until 2017: The Obama administration last month promulgated a new regulation that will make millions more Americans eligible for overtime pay. The regulation, which will take effect in December, doubles the annual salary threshold under which employees receive time-and-a-half after logging 40 hours a week. Labor groups are hailing this move as a victory, but many businesses are trying to avoid forking over any extra compensation. Their resistance, however, may not hold under a rising tide of laws and regulations aimed at protecting workers.

Under current law, most salaried workers who are not executives, managers, or administrators have the right to overtime pay. Workers below a certain salary level (now $23,660) are entitled to it regardless of their job duties. The new regulation extends these protections in two basic ways. One provision raises the nonexempt salary threshold to $47,476 and provides a formula to update it automatically every three years. The second provision offers more specific descriptions of job duties to determine which employees with salaries above the threshold qualify as exempt...



http://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/201...19090c673c

Something strange happened on the last night of the Democratic National Convention.

After the GOP nominee lambasted the Democrats on Twitter for displaying what he viewed as too few American flags, there was a sea of waving flags as far as the eye could see when Hillary Clinton became the first woman to accept a major party's nomination on Thursday.

A small faction of protesters chanting "no more war" as General John Allen spoke were quickly drowned out by chants of "USA!" filling the Philadelphia arena. The most notable refrain from the RNC crowd last week: "Lock her up."
The evening also hammered home the stark tonal difference between the two conventions. After Trump painted America as a downcast country in need of a billionaire savior, night after night of all-star DNC speakers preached a sermon of American exceptionalism, with values that unify us all – talking points once exclusively owned by Republicans.


It was enough to give a lot of conservatives whiplash. Here are just a few of them praising the DNC and bemoaning the state of affairs in their own party.

Conservative writer Ron Fournier:

Quote:Well done, @realDonaldTrump. You made Democrats a party of sunny patriotism and values.
You sure @billclinton didn't ask you to run?
— Ron Fournier (@ron_fournier) July 29, 2016

Quote:Why this convention is better: It's about loving America. GOP convention was about loving Trump. If you didn't love Trump, it offered nada.
— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahNRO) July 29, 2016

Quote:Take about five paragraphs out of that Obama speech and it could have been a Reagan speech. Trust me. I know.
— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) July 28, 2016

Quote:if repubs had championed their principles with specifics rather than embrace autocracy - they wouldn't have yielded this turf to dems.
— GregGutfeld (@greggutfeld) July 29, 2016

Quote:For Republicans who are not social conservatives, I have to imagine last night and tonight at the DNC are having an impact on them.
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) July 29, 2016

Quote:So most of conservative media and the GOP spent the week rooting for Russia, and now the Democrats get to rally around the flag.
Dreadful.
— Steve Deace (@SteveDeaceShow) July 29, 2016

Quote:Snark aside: GOP needs to understand what is happening to them tonight…
— Charlie Sykes (@SykesCharlie) July 29, 2016

Quote:Do you know how old I am? Old enough to remember when speeches like this would've been given at GOP convention… Not Dem one. Brutal.
— Charlie Sykes (@SykesCharlie) July 29, 2016

Quote:How can it be that I am standing at my kitchen counter sobbing because of the messages being driven at the DNC? Where has the GOP gone?
— Rich Galen (@richgalen) July 29, 2016

Quote:This Democratic convention has been an unmitigated disaster for the GOP. Very well produced. Unifying. Patriotic. Bravo.#DNCinPHL
— Matt Mackowiak (@MattMackowiak) July 29, 2016

Quote:I am sure hearing a lot more about God and faith at the DNC than the RNC.
— Amanda Carpenter (@amandacarpenter) July 28, 2016

Quote:Still stunned. Feel like I'm in the twilight zone. Obama just defended America & conservative values from attacks by the Republican nominee.
— (((AG))) (@AG_Conservative) July 28, 2016

Quote:Republicans could have stopped all this.
— Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) July 29, 2016

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post...questions/

Quote:For a week, Jill Stein was everywhere that the Democratic National Convention was not. The Green Party's likely candidate for president made drop-ins to a four-day Socialist Convergence at the Quaker meeting hall, rallied "Bernie or Bust" protesters outside the gates of Philadelphia's sports complex, and sat for interview after interview.

When she sat with The Washington Post's Sarah Parnass and Alice Li, Stein explained her stance on something that had flared up during a Reddit AMA. Did she think vaccines were harmful...



https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post...questions/

This is what a fear happening

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_p...s_are.html

Quote:There are very few endorsements that are going to matter in this presidential election, but Michael Bloomberg’s might be one of them. On Wednesday night in Philadelphia, the three-term mayor of New York City called on his fellow independents to vote for Hillary Clinton. “I am asking you to join with me not out of party loyalty, but out of love of country,” Bloomberg said. Why? Is it because he’s so enthusiastic about her many virtues? Nope, it’s because a Trump presidency would be an unmitigated disaster: “He would make it harder for small businesses to compete, do great damage to our economy, threaten the retirement savings of millions of Americans, lead to greater debt and more unemployment, erode our influence in the world, and make our communities less safe.” Ouch...



http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_p...s_are.html

I was driving back home from an errand.

I saw what I thought was a plane on approach to SFO but it never turned on final, and instead continued heading East. I then realized it was not a plane, it had a tail of ionized matter and debris.

I then thought it might be a fireball ... but it was moving way too slow for that.

My next thought ...

A man made object experiencing a flawed re-entry. In a way it reminded me of how the ill fated space shuttle looked as it started to break up. Was it a MIRVed war head cluster? Would there be others to come, and air bursts soon to follow?

This last train of thought was not too far off. It is being described in the news today as a "Chinese rocket."

I wonder exactly what sort of vehicle it really was.

Was it a hypersonic war head delivery vehicle undergoing some sort of dry run?

Was it indeed a standard rocket, but purposely reentered over the US, to test our defenses against ICBMs and hypersonic vehicles?

Food for thought.

Without thoroughly endorsing it, Alan Watts explains why astrology is relevant to reality. A human is a microcosm of the macrocosm. The stars are in your mind. Each being is in relation to the all and to all others. The body is inside the soul. The horoscope is a map of the universe at the time of a person's birth, therefore it was a drawing of the soul, which is the whole universe as it is focused on your organism. 

https://youtu.be/v7vFOU8e0wU?t=55m52s

I noticed that the Board Statistics at the bottom of the main page says that Maintenance is the newest member (as of today), yet the Member List says that user is banned. Why do some users get banned from this forum, and why are they still included in the Board Statistics?

You hear people talking about how Hillary is one of the most qualified candidates ever to run for office, the same could be said for Herbert Hoover and James Buchanan.